On NPR this morning, Stephen Hadley, National Security Advisor, let loose this fact (transcript provided in the White House Watch, by Dan Froomkin, Washington Post):
The president has been asking for more information on Iran for the last several years. He's spent a lot of time actually bringing the Iranian analysts in and interacting with them directly, trying to probe, understand what they know. . . .
So here's the chief advisor to the President of the United States on national security matters describing a situation where President Bush actively questions Iranian analysts for the past several years.
Now why would Bush be so directly involved with questioning the Iranian analysts? Hadley is describing a very hands-on President, one who is famous for delegating responsibilities and is proud of being the CEO President, to such an extent that even his neocon minions have noted, as evident by this paragraph from a May 1, 2004 Washington Post column by Robert Kagen:
Bush himself is the great mystery in this mounting debacle. His commitment to stay the course in Iraq seems utterly genuine. Yet he continues to tolerate policymakers, military advisers and a dysfunctional policymaking apparatus that are making the achievement of his goals less and less likely. He does not seem to demand better answers, or any answers, from those who serve him. It's not even clear that he understands how bad the situation in Iraq is or how close he is to losing public support for the war, a support that once lost may be impossible to regain.
One might be inclined to believe that President Bush was truly inquisitive, and that following the Iraq intelligence debacle, he was making certain that all the i's were dotted and the t's crossed before agressively pushing for war.
I suspect, though, that it's something different.
During the run-up to the Iraq war, Vice President Cheney was extremely involved in the assessment of intelligence on Iraq, as reported by Walter Pincus and Dana Priest on June 5, 2003 in the Washington Post:
Vice President Cheney and his most senior aide made multiple trips to the CIA over the past year to question analysts studying Iraq's weapons programs and alleged links to al Qaeda, creating an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush administration's policy objectives, according to senior intelligence officials.
It's quite possible that President Bush has been playing the role of Cheney, as the CIA and other intelligence agencies were probably keeping Cheney at arm's length in recent years. It's unlikely, though, that these agencies would maintain distance from Bush. After all, he's the President, and when the President says jump, the common answer by the men and women in his administration has been to answer, "How high?"
Which brings us back to the central question: Why was Bush meeting with the Iranian analysts?